The Dilemma of Disabled Masculinity

From Autoethnography to Sociological Framing

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s the influence of feminism inspired an increasing focus on disabled women’s gendered experience (e.g., Asch and Fine 1988; Begum 1992; Browne, Connors, and Stern 1985; Deegan and Brooks 1985). This literature, a mix of personal narratives and scholarly analyses, was in large part a political response to the perception by disabled women and their allies of the dual discrimination they faced. In contrast, male disabled scholars of the time only sporadically referenced gender as an explicit political issue in their autobiographical and autoethnographic writings and focused predominantly on how impairment affected their sense of masculinity at a personal level (e.g., Kriegel 1991; Murphy 1987; Zola 1982).

It was not until 1989 that Harlan Hahn, a political scientist from the United States with post-polio who began his career writing about the Black civil rights movement, became the first scholar to provide a more comprehensive interpretation of disabled masculinity and one that had political undertones. Hahn’s insights were primarily derived from his own personal experience but augmented through his long-term involvement in disability rights and the feminist-inspired gender and disability literature of the time. Elaborating on Asch and Fine’s point regarding the contradiction between disability which is associated with personal and physical weakness and masculinity which is associated with personal and physical strength, Hahn noted that this sets up a conflict within disabled men requiring some kind of resolution because many of them tend to identify on both personal and political levels with hegemonic notions of masculinity such as independence and bravado rather than identifying as disabled. This, he suggests, creates both political and personal problems for disabled men particularly given that, as much as they would like to deny it, most are excluded in labor and devalued in society. Hahn concluded that, in their attempt to find a partner to collude with them about the unimportance of their impairment, disabled men alienate women; thus, they remain unfulfilled in their personal lives, even if they are successful in their work and career.

To resolve this dilemma, Hahn proposed that disabled men redefine their identities in several ways: by first viewing their difference as aesthetically pleasing (also see Hahn 1988); by exhibiting strength of character through embracing their physiological weakness; and by lastly pursuing both personal and political relations with people who are more interested in their sensitivity, purpose, and commitment than in idealized masculine characteristics of personal power and physical strength.

Influenced by Hahn’s insights, US sociologists Thomas Gerschick and Adam Miller (1994) conducted the first significant research with disabled men on their sense of masculinity. Their study of men with acquired impairments in the United States introduced into the field ideas from the critical study of men and masculinities which had begun to emerge in the mid-1980s. Most significant was Connell’s conceptualization of hegemonic masculinity (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 1985; Connell 1995; Wedgwood 2009). For Connell, hegemonic masculinity is culturally exalted and stabilizes a structure of dominance and oppression in the gender order. While this dominance is most clearly seen in the unequal power relations between men and women, it also occurs among men as part of a hierarchy of historically specific masculinities, including subordinate, complicit, and marginalized masculinities. Subordinate masculinities are those masculinities that are negatively related to hegemonic masculinity, internal to the gender order, best exemplified by gay men, whereas marginalized masculinities are negatively related to the gender order in terms of some other social category or relational structure such as class, ethnicity, or impairment. Multiple masculinities thus exist in relationships of contest and negotiation to one another. However, hegemonic masculinity is seen to exert a reactive force on the gamut of competing masculinities.

Framing their research on disabled masculinity within Connell’s general conceptual schema, Gerschick and Miller developed a typology of three types of relational responses to hegemonic masculinity—reliance, reformulation, and rejection—what they refer to as the “Three R Framework.” Based on interviews with ten men with acquired impairments, in which one task was to have these men provide their perspective on certain American masculine ideals, Gerschick and Miller concluded that some disabled men continue to rely on hegemonic masculine ideals for their sense of self, some reformulate these ideals in line with their limitations, and others reject hegemonic masculinity, formulating instead an alternate masculinity for themselves. Those men in their study who relied on dominant conceptions of masculinity were more likely to internalize feelings of inadequacy and seek to overcompensate for them, perceiving the problem to be in themselves rather than the social structure. This reliance model of disabled masculinity was found to perpetuate the gender order. Men who reformulated masculine ideals, although distancing themselves from hegemonic masculinity, did not present a challenge to the gender order because they still perceived their dilemma as an individual project. According to Gerschick and Miller, rejection offered the most hope for change which they linked to a sociopolitical model of disability. These researchers cautioned, however, that none of their participants wholly fit into one of these response types.

Gerschick and Miller’s use of Connell’s theory of masculinities was a key turning point in the study of disabled masculinity because it provided a more sophisticated sociological framework than the intuitive schema of Hahn. It also provided scholarly impetus to explicitly link disabled men’s dilemma to the feminist and masculinity studies agendas. Further, it presented a general conceptual framework that proved formative—influencing the way in which many subsequent researchers in the field conceptualized the dilemma.

During this embryonic period, several key concerns in the study of disabled men and masculinity developed out of scholarly work on sexuality and disability. In 1981, Hahn had published a groundbreaking critique of the research on sexuality and disability as predominantly concerned with medical and functional problems rather than the social and interpersonal aspects that are often much more important to disabled people (see also Gill 1989). Yet it was not until the mid-to-late-90s that a research focus on interpersonal and social aspects of sexuality and disability began to be taken seriously. Like Hahn, Mitchell Tepper’s (1999, 2001) work was influenced by his own experience of impairment and disability, that of spinal cord injury and paraplegia. However, unlike Hahn, Tepper augmented his personal understanding with systematic research that he conducted with men and women with spinal cord injury. While Tepper’s work was not overtly focused on interpersonal or gender issues (in fact, it was focused on pleasure and orgasm before and after injury), some of the conclusions he drew from his findings nevertheless directly addressed the interpersonal and gendered dimensions of sexuality and disability. Tepper argued that typical masculine socialization in the United States has dire consequences for men who acquire an impairment postadolescence and lose their strength and sense of self-reliance. He suggested that, in reconstructing their masculine identities in the face of their new impairment, disabled men must learn how to express fear and despair.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, disabled masculinity also emerged as a key concern for the men in Tom Shakespeare’s (1999) analysis of the dilemma derived from a larger study of sexuality and disability in the United Kingdom (Shakespeare, Gillespie-Sells, and Davies 1996). This study was theoretically driven by the social model of disability— which had come to prominence in Britain during the 1970s and was heavily influenced by by structuralist and Marxist theories that were especially popular in sociology and across the social sciences at the time. Shakespeare was also indebted to the earlier work of Gerschick and Miller and, by implication, Hahn as well as ideas from post-modern and critical race theorists on perspectivity and intersectionality that were starting to infiltrate disability studies in the late-1990s. Moreover, like Hahn, Shakespeare’s understanding of the central issues was enriched by personal experience as a disabled person (he is a person with restricted growth). What Shakespeare’s insights on disabled masculinity added to our understanding of the dilemma was a crucial acknowledgment that this contradiction is experienced differently depending on impairment type, ethnicity, sexuality and class. As he puts it, “disabled men [not only] differ from one another, but … individual disabled men receive and embody contradictory and confusing messages” (Shakespeare 1999, 60).

Shakespeare’s more nuanced picture of disabled masculinity may also be derived from his research team’s employment of loosely structured, open-ended interviews with participants who were simply encouraged to elaborate on their sexual lives. That gender emerged spontaneously from these semistructured interviews as one of the predominant concerns of the disabled men and women in the study reveals the intimate link between sexuality and gender and that sexual negotiations are in fact gendered negotiations. Following Gerschick and Miller’s lead, Shakespeare incorporated a relational perspective based on gender power but further contended that prejudice against any “other,” like women, nature, ethnic, or sexual minorities and disabled people, can be attributed to hegemonic masculinity. Shakespeare concluded with a call to redefine gender relations and particularly masculinity in “less oppressive, more open and more acceptable ways,” seeing models for this reformulated masculinity existing in the margins, in for example, the lives of gay men and disabled men (Shakespeare 1999, 63–64).

This formative scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s by early scholars in the field laid important groundwork for the sociological study of disabled men and masculinities and opened up productive empirical and theoretical directions for future researchers. Yet, several critiques can be made about this body of work. To begin with there was a general lack of specificity relating to impairments. Aside from Tepper’s research which was specifically about men with spinal cord injury, impairment differences among disabled men were not much noted nor deemed important. This can be at least partly attributed to the pan-impairment focus within disability studies at that time on disabled people as a homogenous group—an emphasis that served as an empowering political strategy. It is also partly due to the sociopolitical focus on the disabling structures of society rather than an individual’s impairments per se, which was seen purely as the domain of the medical view of disability.

Moreover, autoethnographic and insider accounts during this period such as Hahn’s that spoke for the larger category of disabled men often inadvertently relied on insights gleaned from their personal experience and particular impairment. Failing to differentiate between impairments implies that differences in type and degree of impairment do not articulate and interact differently with masculine expectations. Indeed, the minimal attention paid to differences in impairment, as well as to intersecting identities such as ethnicity, class, and sexuality, presented a rather one-dimensional picture of disabled men. Even, Shakespeare who had argued that disabled men embody masculinity differently depending on the particularities of their situation, unfortunately did not elaborate on his important insight at the time; although he further elucidated this point more generally for disabled people in later work (e.g., Shakespeare 2006).

In addition, with the exception of Gerschick and Miller’s work, most of the early scholarship was minimally theorized and even the typology devised by these two researchers, an early milestone in the field, was not without its limitations. By explicitly asking for insights from participants into their own relationship to hegemonic masculinity, Gerschick and Miller may have compromised contextual richness for a more conceptual understanding—one that is not borne out well in the empirical data discussed in their paper. In particular, while they presented some examples of participants relying on, reformulating and rejecting hegemonic masculinity, they failed to present a convincing argument for the distinction between reformulation and rejection. For example, one participant is characterized as rejecting the hegemonic imperative for biological fatherhood by acknowledging that what is really important is the relationship between father and child. But another participant comes to the conclusion that sex is more about the emotional than the physical, and the researchers characterize this change in perspective as a reformulation. This speaks to the issue of providing contextual richness in analyses of disabled masculinity—richness in which the reader can ascertain the interpretational fit between theoretical schema and empirical evidence.

This lack of contextualization was partially addressed in a later paper by Gerschick (1998) in which there was a de-emphasis on the reformulation/rejection distinction. Employing the three interacting concepts of: (1) the stigma of impairment; (2) gender as an interactional process; and (3) hegemonic masculinity as a gender standard, Gerschick investigated the arenas of work, athletics, sexuality, the body, and independence/control in the lives of disabled men. To the data he collected in his research with Miller, he also added ten autobiographies, semiautobiographies and collections of essays by disabled men. In this later article, Gerschick perceived disabled men as either complicit with or resisting hegemonic masculine standards; and there seems to be an implicit acknowledgment that resistance can embody reformulation and/or rejection and that the line between them is not so clear in everyday practice within different social contexts.

A final critique that can be made of these early researchers is that they often ended their articles with suggestions that placed most of the onus on individual men with impairments to overcome the dilemma of disabled masculinity. For instance, Gerschick contends that marginalization creates a social space of reduced expectations and diminished scrutiny within which disabled men can construct and revise counterhegemonic gender identities largely unnoticed by the nondisabled majority: “In order for this reconstruction to occur, men with physical disabilities must resist the stigmatization associated with having a disability, change their primary reference group, and reject or redefine the hegemonic standards of career orientation, activeness, physical strength and athleticism, sexual desirability and virility, and independence and control” (Gerschick 1998, 174). This is not to say these researchers fail to recognize or critique the structural constraints of ableism and gender that men with impairments face—far from it. However, in highlighting the project of self-change, that is, of redefining or reconstructing one’s self in terms of nonhegemonic forms of masculinity, they perhaps default to a modernist prioritizing of the individual and downplay the limited power disabled people have to influence how they are viewed by many nondisabled people (Wedgwood 2011) and how we might work to change these constraining structures at a societal, rather than individual, level.

Diversification in the New Millennium

Within this mix of scholarship and research on disabled masculinity in the 1980s and 1990s were the seeds of more nuanced perspectives that would develop in the new millennium into a more detailed elucidation of the cultural and psychosocial contours of disabled men’s responses to the dilemma of disabled masculinity. There were several reasons for this. In the mid -to-late-1990s, sociopolitical models of disability, especially the social model in the UK, came under increasing scrutiny and critique for their conceptual limitations (e.g., Corker 1999; Hughes and Paterson 1997; Paterson and Hughes 1999). The emergence of this critique prompted an increase in the theoretical and analytical diversity within disability studies (e.g., Hughes 2002; Shakespeare 2006; Shakespeare and Watson 2002; Shildrick 2002). Meanwhile, around the same time, the critical studies of men and masculinities experienced a diversification of perspectives and a move toward interdisciplinary research. Since the publication of the book Masculinities in 1995, much of the social–scientific work on men and masculinities has been influenced by Connell’s theory of multiple masculinities and hegemony (Wedgwood 2009). Nevertheless, at the same time, different ways of researching and conceptualizing masculinities have also emerged and researchers are now analyzing multiple forms of masculinity, using an increasing variety and combination of theoretical and methodological approaches (Wedgwood and Connell 2004). Whilst not necessarily suggesting a lineal progression of ideas, as a result of these developments a more complex understanding of disabled men’s gendered experience began to develop.

In the field of disability studies dominated by sociopolitical models, the body was initially perceived as irrelevant to an emancipatory politics. Consequently, early calls (Zola 1991) to bring the body into the field were largely ignored. This was primarily due to the strict separation of an impairment’s functional limitations from the disabling structures of a society in these models, which dismissed the role of the body in disability both in terms of the ways impairments are experienced and the processes whereby everyday structures and meanings become embodied. However, during the 1990s, increasing numbers of disability scholars and sociologists called for the development of an approach to disability studies which accounted for the body but not at the expense of broader social structures and the relationships of power within which everyday experiences occur (Hughes 2002; Hughes and Paterson 1997; Paterson and Hughes 1999; Shakespeare and Watson 1996; Turner 2001). Thus, by the dawning of the new millennium, the body was accorded more credence in disability studies although there were still many disability scholars who maintained allegiance to more strictly sociopolitical models. Bringing back the body into the study of disability was beneficial to the theorization of the dilemma of disabled masculinity in several important ways. To begin with, it focused attention on the dynamic interaction between agency, practice and structure, a major debate in social theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s (e.g. Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984) which had begun to influence disability studies by the turn of the century. This theoretical development was important because, although structures like ableism and gender undoubtedly shape people’s practices, it is not all one-way; “people’s practices [also] constitute (and reproduce) structures” (Sewell 1992, 4). People with impairments are not “passive victims of a society that fails to include them” (Watson 1998, 150). For instance, Gil Valentine’s (1999) case study of a spinal cord injured man whose acquired impairment severed his ability to reproduce his previous working-class male identity and bodily hexis shows how, by taking up wheelchair basketball and becoming an international athlete, this man resisted negative discourses of disability and renegotiated hegemonic masculine characteristics within the parameters of his impairment, thereby developing a confident self-identity once more. Yet, as Valentine concludes, this man’s renegotiation of his identity does not challenge ableist social structures directly. Nor, we would add, does it challenge, but rather attempts to recuperate, hegemonic forms of masculinity.

Moreover, while participation in disability sports is a way for some physically disabled men to construct or recuperate a hegemonic masculinity (Berger 2008; Lindemann and Cherney 2008; Rapala and Manderson 2005), not all are able to do so (Wedgwood forthcoming) due to the fact that levels of personal agency are “laden with collectively produced differences of power” (Sewell 1992, 20–21). Thus, our understanding of the intersection of these two structures needs to take into account differences in power related to gender, class, status, ethnicity, and sexuality and how these can affect agency in any particular situation such as participation in disability sports.

For example, one’s decision of whether or not to participate in disability sport, or indeed any other project that involves hegemonic masculine practices, invariably includes an evaluation of one’s relative loss/gain in social status. Indeed, Brett Smith and Andrew Sparkes show how four men who experienced spinal cord injury through playing rugby union in the United Kingdom failed in their attempts to reconstruct the self that they had been before their injury because the status of their athletic identities as high-level sportsmen was such that they did not view disability sports as “real” sports (Sparkes and Smith 2002, 270). Faced with their new status as impaired, their masculine sense of dominance, assertiveness, and aggression became problematic and they described a loss of masculine self and their social, personal, and corporeal athletic identities. Disability sports was not palatable to these men because it did not offer them the high social status that they had enjoyed in sport pre-injury. This incongruity between the responses of Valentine’s informant and Smith and Sparkes’ participants in their use of sport within the masculine project shows the importance of noting status hierarchies, and changes within status hierarchies, and the role these can play in producing different outcomes.

Another positive development in the field to come from focusing on embodiment is that it highlights degree of impairment as a possible factor in these kinds of responses to the dilemma. Valentine informs the reader that his participant had no function below the chest, while Smith and Sparkes’ participants suffered a C4/5 spinal cord injury. Though information identifying the specific functional limitations that were incurred by the men in Smith and Sparkes’ study is not offered directly, these authors do tell us that one participant tried archery but found that having to use various adaptations and aids distanced him from the carnal and visceral experience he had become accustomed to pre-injury. The implication being that if his functional limitations were less and he did not have to use aids, he would have enjoyed his archery experience more. Thus, status changes and degree of impairment shape disabled men’s responses to hegemonic masculine expectations.

A major limitation in both the study and theorization of disabled masculinity is that until recently much of the impairment-specific research has tended to focus on men with spinal cord injuries. This is perhaps partly due to the fact that acquired injuries present a stark example of how disabled masculinity can manifest as an identity crisis driven by disruption of their bodily proprioception and a challenge to their taken-for-granted embodiment of gendered power. As Connell (1995) suggests, masculinity becomes vulnerable when, for whatever reason, gendered performance breaks down (54). Those who acquire an impairment after they develop an embodied identity as a nondisabled person can become disconnected from their impaired bodies (Seymour 1998, 1), with differing implications than for people with early-onset impairments. Thus, there has been much less-systematic research on the masculinity dilemma for men with early-onset impairments. This is a critical lacunae in our understanding.

The bias in the field toward men with acquired injuries that has predominated is likely to be at least partly due to the fact that people with impairments such as spinal injuries or amputations are accorded more similarity with the nondisabled, normative majority, what Garland-Thomson has termed the “normates” (1997), than people with early-onset impairments like cerebral palsy (Howe, 2008; Mastro et al., 1996). While from the normative perspective, the former may be perceived as ‘once like us’ and may benefit from an empathy as to what terrible circumstances (e.g., accident, illness) befell them, those with early-onset impairments are likely seen as more fundamentally ‘other’ who from an early age transgress bodily norms with dysarthric speech and/or involuntary bodily movement such as drooling or repetitive limb motion (Howe 2008; Schantz and Gilbert 2008; Shuttleworth 2000). That is, people with early-onset impairments may be more readily perceived as anomalous (Douglas 1966), monstrous or abject (Hughes 2009; Shildrick 2002) than people with acquired impairments. Thus, although they may not have to deal with biological disruption and a sudden assault on their personhood, people with early-onset impairments must contend with a more radical transgression of normative embodiment from a young age and accordingly integrate their identity in the face of the powerful cultural symbolism that their impairment/impairments can evoke.

The biased focus on men with acquired injuries reflects a gendered as well as ableist viewpoint. That is, it is indicative of a concern primarily with ‘real’ men who lost their masculinity, rather than those who were never perceived as masculine in the first place because they had an impairment from an early age. This focus on loss and subsequent attempt at reconstructing masculine identity perhaps also accounts for the concomitant emphasis on narrative process in much of the work with men with spinal cord injuries, a methodological approach that is much less employed in research with men with early-onset impairments.

A critical benefit of the more recent inclusion of a broader range of impairments within the purview of masculinity research is being able to better discern how age at onset, type, and degree of impairment can influence responses to the dilemma of disabled masculinity. For instance, Lisa Gibbs (2005) shows how progressive pain and increasing functional impairment for men with severe arthritis over time resulted in their move from relying on to reformulating or rejecting hegemonic masculinity. More tellingly, Gibbs suggests that as severity of pain, impairment, and distress increased, these men’s reliance on hegemonic masculine expectations like strength and independence decreased and they were more apt to access self-management services and support groups that emphasize sharing of feelings. On the other hand, Barbara Gibson et al.’s (2007) research on the lives of men with Duchene’s muscular dystrophy reveals how, because of the relatively rapid progression of their condition, increasing degree of impairment and relatively truncated life span, these men developed a sense of fatalism, which overrode any weak attempts at resistance. However, for the men with cerebral palsy, a relatively stable condition, in Russell Shuttleworth’s (2000, 2004, 2007) ethnography of sexuality and disability, this fatalistic sense was absent. There was no sense of urgency for these men who from a young age had striven to integrate their differently functioning bodies into their identity. Through trial and error, many participants of Shuttleworth’s research came to pragmatically resist hegemonic notions of masculinity and sexuality in the context of negotiating sexual relationships because they found that acting strictly in terms of the hegemonic standards was often not an effective way for them to be successful in love. This stark reality led some of these men to expand their masculine repertoire to include and emphasize dispositions and practices that stressed sensitivity and interdependence; more typical masculine dispositions and practices were not totally abandoned but employed less often depending on their relative usefulness to a particular romantic or sexual situation (Shuttleworth 2000, 2004).

As Gerschick (2000) emphasized early in the new millennium, “age of onset combines with the type, severity, and visibility of a person’s disability to influence the degree to which she or he is taught and subjected to gendered expectations” (1265). Indeed, any analysis of disabled masculinity requires an understanding of masculinity as a dynamic and context-specific social structure. For instance, while Gibbs and Shuttleworth’s participants both pragmatically reformulated or rejected hegemonic masculinity by “seeking emotional support” and “emphasizing sensitivity and interdependence” a closer look at the dynamics within these two contexts shows a myriad of differences in both the pressures and claims exerted by masculine expectations and the precise ways these disabled men formulated their response in practice.

Recent research has also included several historical investigations into the responses of disabled men to the call to be masculine. A historical perspective is crucial in discerning both the dynamism and durability of this social structure. For instance, research on the post World War I era, a historical period which was crucial in the development of some of the principles of rehabilitation (Stiker 1999), has shown how notions around masculinity were changing but also stable during this time (e.g. Gagen 2007; Kinder 2007). A powerful example is Wendy Gagen’s (2007) case of a World War I veteran who joined the King’s Royal Rifle Corp in 1915 and had to have an arm amputated early in his stint. Analyzing this man’s documents and letters, she employs Connell’s notion of body reflexive practices to show how this man’s injury took on almost an identity of its own as he negotiated his gender identity against the prevailing view that disability equaled emasculation. Gagen provides a detailed description of the way disabled men take up new projects of selfhood (e.g. mastering prosthetic limbs or mastering remaining function); but she also effectively demonstrates that in doing so they nevertheless recuperate hegemonic masculinity, and thus show its durability over time.

The dynamism of disabled masculinity becomes most apparent in research that focuses not only on changes from one socio-historical context to another but also the changes that can occur from one life-phase to the next, the latter being an especially under-theorized process in this area of study. Daniel Wilson’s (2004) study, for example, reveals how both historical change and different life phases can impact the interaction between masculinity and disability. Wilson examines the writings of men who became impaired as a result of polio during the 1940s and 1950s in the United States when masculinity was perceived to be in crisis due to the anxieties of the cold war and collectivist mass society. It seemed to these disabled men at the time that the only way for them to “construct a sense of masculinity consistent with society’s values and expectations” (121) and also the rehabilitative ethos was to “fight like a man” and wage war against their condition. This masculinist creed did in fact often reduce the limitations of their impairments and thus had functional meaning for these men, but at the cost of repressing the anger that they felt at their fate. It was only with the onset of post-polio syndrome later in life when the urgency of the masculinity construction project during young adulthood had waned and the metaphors of competition no longer sustained them that “they had to create new images of masculinity to sustain their struggle with disability” in a later life phase (p. 119).

At first, scholarly work on masculinity and disability understandably focused primarily on the intersection of these two social categories. However, in the late 1990s, there was renewed effort within disability studies to incorporate a concern with how some disabled people experience prejudice because of their identification with two or more marginalized social categories referred to both in the general sociological and disability literature as “multiple identities” (Vernon 1998, 1999). The concept of intersectionality emerged out of the writings of black feminists in the US in their attempts to move beyond the simply additive notion of multiple identities (Collins 1990; Crenshaw 1991). Intersectionality is concerned with working out how social categories like race and gender less mechanistically and more complexly affect self-identification and social location. It was this move toward intersectional analyses that Shakespeare was partially alluding to in his assertion that disabled men embody masculinity according to the particularities of their experience and which was taken up in the new millennium by disability scholars (e.g., Meekosha 2006; O’Neill and Hird 2001; Rapala and Manderson 2005).

Some research with disabled men during this period draws from the literature on intersectionality in order to explore how the power differentials embodied in the intersecting categories of class, ethnicity, and sexuality interact with disabled masculinity (e.g., O’Neill and Hird 2001; Rapala and Manderson 2005). For instance, Terry O’Neill and Myra Hird (2001) interviewed 13 gay disabled men in order to interrogate the tensions between intersecting masculinities, revealing how they subordinated disabled masculinity beneath gay masculinity. Whilst their research participants acknowledged the possibility of resistance and dissent against hegemonic male power, they dismissed the possibility of “a combined homosexual-disabled axis…[and] neither dissent nor its objective—the contestation of male structural power—was considered plausible if undertaken under the auspices of an identity which prioritized impairment over sexuality” (218). This hierarchization of intersecting marginalized masculine identities and the further subordination that may exist within these marginalized masculinities themselves (queer and impairment hierarchies) present some seemingly intractable problems in the quest for working coalitions against hegemonic masculine forms (see also Blyth 2010). O’Neill & Hird’s study makes an important contribution to the slowly growing literature on the intersection of non-hegemonic masculinities with disability. Unfortunately, however, though they take a less one-size-fits-all approach to masculinity, their conceptualization of disability is more generic, as they do not specify their participants’ impairments.

Current Perspectives On Disabled Masculinity

The past decade or so has seen a rising research interest within the social sciences in disability and masculinity. Over this time, research on disabled masculinity has increasingly moved beyond a static understanding of disability and of masculinity, toward a dynamic view of the articulation and interaction between the two social structures. This conceptual sophistication has been aided in part by the growth in perspectivity and intersectional theory within the social sciences but is also due to the increasing use of ethnographic and life history methods to study disabled men’s lived experience. As far back as 1990 Connell had called for more in-depth, life history studies and ethnographic contextualization of men’s lived experience as ways to more clearly comprehend “social structures and their dynamics as they impinge on (and are reconstituted in) personal life” (Connell 1990: 84). Indeed, the use of life history case studies is central to the grounding of the theory Connell develops in Masculinities and the deep insights into gender relations and gender construction produced (Wedgwood 2009: 333). For instance, Nikki Wedgwood’s recent life history study of the role of sport in the lives of young men with physical impairments reveals that, whilst playing sport is a form of cultural capital in the construction of a masculine identity during adolescence for young men with impairments, male social power constructed and conferred within a disability-specific sport may not necessarily have currency in the broader society (Wedgwood forthcoming). By focusing on adolescence as a crucial time in terms of gender identity development, Wedgwood’s study also contributes to our understanding of the complexities of the disabled masculinity dilemma by highlighting life-phase as another complicating factor.

At the same time, autobiographical and auto-ethnographic literature written by disabled men continue to be a rich source for sociological analysis and interpretation, as it has been from the beginning. Indeed, some disabled men are extending Hahn’s suggestion to construct “disability as beautiful” and as a “strength” not weakness (e.g. Guter and Killacky 2004). Other disabled scholars are attempting to dissolve the ability/disability distinction in their work (e.g. Overboe 2007: 219). As Gerschick (1998) showed us early on, such transformative narratives offer social researchers unique insight into the dynamic interaction between social structures and the way they are reconstituted in personal life and the possibility to further conceptualize how disabled men construct and resolve the dilemma of disabled masculinity.

Whilst there has been a limited range of diversity in impairment-specific research, the gap between research with men with early-onset and acquired impairment has diminished. Yet there remains an almost exclusive focus on how the dilemma of disabled masculinity is experienced by men with physical impairments. In a rare exception, Nathan Wilson’s (2009) richly contextualized ethnographic research in group homes for young men with significant cognitive impairments, clearly confirms that the dilemma is a sociocultural construction. However, because these men are significantly cognitively impaired and so are unable to participate in interviews, the dilemma can only be gleaned from interviews with their caregivers; thus, the degree to which they experience a contradiction of expectations between being masculine and being disabled is unknown. It may well be that men with cognitive and intellectual impairments experience such a dilemma only minimally if at all. While further study of the intersection of masculinity with intellectual impairments might add to this understanding, there is a also a critical need for impairment-specific research with men with sensory impairments, degenerative diseases, transient impairments such as mental illness and impairments that affect social functioning such as Aspergers.

A recent trend has been the medicalization of masculinity (Rosenfeld and Faircloth 2006) which reframes particular issues and behavior previously considered personal or social issues as medical conditions or impairments. A good example of this is the diagnosis of “learning disability” and “attention deficit disorders (ADD)” amongst mostly young boys (Hardt, Grand, and Riley 2006). What was previously perceived on a natural continuum of young boy and adolescent male behavior is now redefined as requiring treatment to control behavior and attention. For some young boys with “ADD” there may be no treatment that will prove to be satisfactory, and it becomes pertinent to ask whether the medicalization of these issues will lead to boys so labeled experiencing the dilemma of disabled masculinity.

Cross-cultural research promises to provide further challenges to the ways in which the dynamics between masculinity and disability are seen to play out. Indeed, to what extent the dilemma of disabled masculinity is universal or culture-bound is mainly conjecture at this point because there has been very little work on disabled masculinity that does not pertain to Western societies. The minimal research which has been conducted thus far indicates both broad similarities with the dilemma in Western cultures along with differences in how these similarities are locally interpreted in terms of embodiment, cultural meaning and social context. For example, anthropologist Matthew Kohrman’s (1999, 2005) research on mobility impaired men in China showed that, as in Western societies, people who have difficulty walking experience stigma and discrimination and that the expectation to venture out into the public sphere and earn a living affects men’s identity development more than women’s due to higher expectations for men in public life. Yet, at the same time these broad similarities were imbued with ideas about national development and mobility and the Confucian emphasis that transmutes bodily imperfection into social meaning.

James Staples’ recently published paper on his anthropological work with men with leprosy and men with cerebral palsy in India provides an even more complex cross-cultural example both across impairments and social contexts within a particular society. Staples found that the spacticity and involuntary movements of men with CP make them appear as “less able to perform the roles associated with men” than men with leprosy (555). However, the fact that the participants with CP resided in middle-class homes and rehabilitation settings in which they had to contend more often with the larger society contrasted with men with leprosy who resided in colonies where traditional gender roles could more easily be enacted complicates any direct comparisons of disabled masculinity (see also Phillips 2010).

Where To From Here?

Our discussion of this research has been selective. We have highlighted developments we feel are of major significance in this field of study, along with certain gaps in thinking. Though we have divided our review of research on the intersection of masculinity and disability into several periods for the purposes of this paper, these are largely arbitrary and not to suggest that the impact of theoretical developments in the field have been linear and consistently applied. For example, earlier insights such as Shakespeare’s that disabled men will embody the dilemma differently depending on a range of identity differences while picked up sporadically by some researchers (for example, O’Neil and Hird, 2001) did not become a driving theoretical force in the field until recently. Nevertheless, on the whole, scholarship on masculinity and disability has become more dynamic at least in theory and most researchers now explicitly recognize that a range of other intersecting identities and contexts can effect disabled men’s sense of masculinity. We would urge researchers, however, to extend themselves further.

The most critical problem conceptually, as we have indicated is that the focus of study has been more on masculinity and how it intersects with disability as an almost generic category, rather than on how masculinity (or masculinities) intersect(s) differently with various types of impairment. Thus, though there is plenty of research on the dilemma of disabled masculinity for men who acquire a physical impairment post-childhood and for groups of men with diverse impairments studied as if they were a homogenous group, less research has been conducted with men who have specific impairments, particularly early-onset, intellectual or degenerative impairments. We therefore urge researchers to open up the concept of intersectionality to accommodate a range of differences in bodily, cognitive, intellectual and behavioral types (impairments) in their interaction with masculinities and to show in more explicit detail how context and life phase contribute to this dynamism.

The core aspects of the dilemma of disabled masculinity recognized by early scholars and researchers in the field are still cogent today and in many ways continue to inform our analyses. We suggest that the notion of a ‘dilemma’ will continue to hold relevance for scholars and researchers interested in how masculinity impinges on the experience of disabled persons. Yet as research from the past decade or so has shown there are still unresolved conceptual problems and the dilemma of disabled masculinity itself is not beyond certain challenges, particularly the question of its universality across different impairments, contexts, life phases and cultures.